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Add to SafariWhen comparing Kaleidoscope vs vimdiff, the Slant community recommends vimdiff for most people. In the question“What are the best folder/file compare/diff tools for either OSX, Linux or Windows?” vimdiff is ranked 4th while Kaleidoscope is ranked 12th. The most important reason people chose vimdiff is:
It's practically vim, this means that the whole interface is mouse-free, this increases development speed significantly since you are only using the keyboard.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Simple UI
Kaleidoscope has a beautiful and simple UI. It displays the two files that are being compared side to side, highlighting all the differences in a way that's easy to understand.
Pro Diff within a line
When working in code, line-by-line diff can still be hard to spot small changes within the line. Kaleidoscope will highlight what has changed.
Pro Supports comparing folders
Pro Image difference viewer
Kaleidoscope supports image diff viewer in addition to git diff. It's able to find even the slightest changes between two versions of the same image.
Pro Mouse-free interface
It's practically vim, this means that the whole interface is mouse-free, this increases development speed significantly since you are only using the keyboard.
Pro Lightweight
Since it's inside vim, it's very lightweight and fast. It fires up quickly and it does all operations painlessly.
Pro Helpful to people who work a lot inside the terminal
Using command-line tools (vim/git) keep you stick in the terminal.
Cons
Con Mac OS only
Kaleidoscope is a Mac OS X only app.
Con Paid software
Kaleidoscope is not free, costing $69.99.
Con Not for people who are not used to vim
Since this is basically a vim feature, it's clear that people who aren't used to vim and it's keyboard-based interface would find it very hard to work with vimdiff.
